In a print mode referred to as hold print included in an image forming system configured by connecting a terminal device and an image forming apparatus through a network, a print job transmitted from the terminal device is stored in the image forming apparatus and the printing is executed by a user who should print the print job coming to the image forming apparatus.
When such a hold print mode is utilized, if a hold print job is forgotten by a user who should print the job, the hold print job is kept stored in a storage unit, resulting in problems such as running out of available space in a hard disk and highly confidential document data remaining in the image forming apparatus.
To solve such problems, a system is proposed that sets a retention period for a hold print job to automatically delete the data if the set retention period expires (Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2000-276314).
However, since the deletion processing is not executed unless a retention period set for a hold print job expires in the above conventional technology, if long retention periods are set, forgotten hold print jobs are continuously accumulated and occupy the hard disk and memory of the image forming apparatus, and other functions such as scanning utilizing the hard disk may not be used.